Q The Music: The James Bond Concert Spectacular – Review – Grand Opera House, York

By Tony Greenway, April 2025

As any 007 geek (hello!) will tell you, a number of not-so-secret ingredients should be put into the James Bond movie cocktail shaker. A dash of action and spectacle. A squeeze of glamour. An infusion of exotic, globe-hopping locations. Top it all off with a super villain — hollowed out volcano optional — who is holding the world to ransom with pilfered nuclear missiles, germ warfare weaponry, nanobots (whatever THEY are), and/or space lasers (delete where applicable). Serve.

Yet 007 filmmakers forget another must-have ingredient at their peril. Bond just wouldn’t be Bond without his trademark music — and, specifically, the music of the late, great, York-born John Barry, who gave Britain’s best-known spy his brilliantly bombastic and instantly recognisable sound. Miss that out entirely (rogue adventure Never Say Never Again couldn’t use the James Bond Theme for legal reasons so unwisely opted for a jazzy score instead) or go off the musical piste (the plinky-plonk Goldeneye soundtrack) and the whole thing loses its fizz. The lesson? Music can make or break a James Bond film.

Trumpeter Warren Ringham understands this better than most, which is why his James Bond music tribute band Q the Music (geddit!?) — which performed at the Grand Opera House in York as part of a UK tour on Sunday night — is so deadly accurate. Arrangement-wise, you could be listening to the originals.

“Formidable”

Mind you, the three vocalists who perform with the band wisely don’t attempt to sound like the original performers. There is only one Shirley Bassey, after all. Nevertheless, Matt Walker has such range that he can give it some Tom Jones-like welly on ‘Thunderball’ before shifting gears into a Sam Smith falsetto on ‘Writing’s on the Wall’ from Spectre. Meanwhile, Sulene Fleming — who once sang lead for Brand New Heavies — is brought on whenever some formidable Bassey-style attitude is needed, most notably for ‘Goldfinger’ and ‘Diamonds Are Forever’. Fleming (no relation to Ian) also rips through Lulu’s ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’, Tina Turner’s ‘Goldeneye’ and kd lang’s ‘Surrender’ — the end theme from Tomorrow Never Dies — without breaking sweat.

Even Bond songs I’m not fond of (I’m looking at you Sheena Easton’s ‘For Your Eyes Only’) sound better when given the Q the Music live band treatment. Take ‘Another Way to Die’ by Jack White, aka the theme from Quantum of Solace. White is, of course, a musical genius; but his original sounds like a piano, an electric guitar and a drum-kit being pushed down the stairs. Played live by Ringham and co, and with Walker and Fleming on vocals, the song actually breathes.

Threading the evening together is Caroline Bliss, who starred as Miss Moneypenny in Timothy Dalton’s two Bond movies The Living Daylights and (fleetingly) Licence to Kill. She introduces each number and tells anecdotes from her time playing the character, remembering that one of her lines involved inviting Bond over to listen to her (shudder) “Barry Manilow collection.”

“Anthemic”

It helps that Ringham knows his Bond backwards (he once hosted a nearly three-hour deep dive podcast dissecting the iconic James Bond Theme) and understands what the audience wants. And what they want are the most recognisable Bond numbers: ‘Goldfinger’, ‘Diamonds are Forever’, ‘From Russia with Love’, ‘Live and Let Die’, ‘Thunderball’, ‘You Only Live Twice’, ‘Skyfall’, ‘We Have All the Time in the World’, etc. And they get them.

That said, Bond aficionados will jump out of their tuxedos to learn that Q the Music also have a number of incidental soundtrack cues in their repertoire. Tonight, they give the bouncy Bee Gees-influenced disco of Bond 77 (heard during action sequences in ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’) an airing; and, as a special tribute to John Barry (they are in York, after all), his alternative anthemic Bond theme called 007, which appears in five of the super spy’s earliest adventures.

After a rousing ‘Nobody Does it Better’ from The Spy Who Loved Me, the band gets a standing ovation. Ringham notes that there is just one theme they haven’t played, so introduces Fleming back on stage to belt through Gladys Knight’s ‘Licence to Kill’ for an encore.

He’s wrong, though, because there is another Bond song that Q the Music leave out: Madonna’s ‘Die Another Day’. It’s a lucky, death-defying escape worthy of 007 himself.